Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/385

Rh impossible. In the case under consideration, the formula seems to be, "I am glad because I am sorry." That is manifestly absurd. A cause of sorrow cannot, as such, be a cause of pleasure. Therefore the luxury of grief implies a belief in contradictories. This is the perplexity. Let us see if it may not be diminished if we approach the subject from another side.

One of the most familiar symptoms of the state of mind in question is the feminine pleasure in crying. You cry, we are apt to say, because you are unhappy. How then can you find pleasure in crying? The answer would probably be that, although crying is caused by grief, it implies a transformation of grief which, at the moment, is agreeable. The mind has been in a state of tension, and the tension is relaxed when the tears come. The process is one of relief from a painful state of the system. Grief, like other emotions, swells and falls, as every one must have observed, in a series of waves. The passion gradually increases to a culminating point; then comes a period of relaxation during which it declines, and, by comparison, this period is agreeable. In men, and especially in women, of weak and irritable nerves, this second period announces itself by weeping. The stress of the torture is over; the tension is relieved by the discharge. The two periods are generally translated in terms of sentiment by a feeling of blank despair during the first period, implying a hopeless impulse to struggle against the inevitable, and, during the second period, by a sense of resignation or readiness to accept the position against which it is in vain to struggle. It is not surprising that, under certain circumstances, this latter period should be regarded as absolutely pleasant, and finally become an object of desire.

Still, it may be said, the feeling is obviously illogical. It is absurd to go up a mountain in order to have the pleasure of coming down, or to go through an illness in order to have the pleasure of convalescence. This is quite true, though we may suppose that, in morbid states of the organism, the illness partly loses its terrors, whilst the pleasure of recovery continues to be attractive. Nay, it is possible that there may be diseases which thus produce more pleasure than pain. The actual suffering may be small, and the pleasure of recovery great. Doubtless it is better to be healthy on any showing; nor do we assert that any such disease actually exists in fact. To suppose its existence, however, is not to accept a contradiction; and still less is it a contradiction to suppose a state of mind in which the pleasures of relief are more attractive in anticipation than the pains of the preliminary stage are repulsive. We assume, at worst, that people make a false calculation. The mind, for some reason, is so impressed by the equivocal charm of the melting mood that it anticipates a balance of pleasure, even when it has to pay the cost of the preliminary mood of congealment. Indulgence of the luxury of grief is in all cases objectionable, and indicative of some morbid tendency. But, admitting so much, it does not follow that it implies more than a very common error of judgment, or rather — for the word "judgment" implies too much conscious reasoning — of erroneous instinctive appreciation.

Nothing, of course, is commoner than the phenomenon so often remarked by moralists, that an immediate pleasure blinds us to the remoter consequences of pain. Every day thousands of men get drunk who know perfectly well that the pleasure will have to be atoned by pains incomparably worse than the momentary exhilaration. Why should not the reverse take place in some cases? The more distant pleasure, that is, may overbalance the nearer pain in its effect upon the imagination, if the pleasure has a specially attractive side to it and the pain is one which, for some reason, has ceased to be very repulsive. Most vices fortunately may be shown to involve bad reasoning, even upon the simplest utilitarian grounds; but, unfortunately, that does not prevent people from indulging in them. In the case we are considering the bad reasoning involved seems to be more palpable than in most others; but still, all that is implied is bad reasoning in the sense of erroneous calculation, not bad reasoning in the sense of consciously accepting a self-contradictory proposition. This last is the only kind of bad reasoning of which we can plausibly say that it is not constantly illustrated in the daily behavior of mankind.

After all that can be said, it must be admitted that there is a glaring absurdity in the desire for what can at most be described by the paradoxical phrase of a pleasurable kind of pain. We may observe, however, that in all such problems the view which identifies feeling with the implied logic is apt to lead us to palpable errors. It is a familiar argument, for example, with pessimists that life must be painful because all desire implies want. If I eat or drink it is because I am hungry 